Commonplace book

orig. A book in which ‘commonplaces’ or passages important for reference were collected, usually under general heads; hence, a book in which one records passages or matters to be especially remembered or referred to, with or without arrangement.1578 COOPERThesaurus A studious yong man ... may gather to himselfe good furniture both of words and approved phrases ... and to make to his use as it were a common place booke. 1642 FULLERHoly & Prof. St. A Common-place-book contains many notions in garrison, whence the owner may draw out an army into the field.

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Tuesday, June 08, 2010

David Markson, who is ritually identified as a “postmodern novelist,” died in his Greenwich Village apartment last Friday. He was eighty-two.

Like Levi Asher, I have never been able to read Markson, but it is obvious that he was dear to many of his peers in the fiction trade. After two “Harry Fannin detective novels,” he tasted success in 1965 with The Ballad of Dingus Magee. In the New York Times, Martin Levin described it succinctly: “camp meets the golden West.” It was filmed by MGM five years later with Frank Sinatra in the title role.

But with Going Down, his next novel, Markson undertook his project of “experimental writing.” Heavily influenced by Malcolm Lowry, the novel followed a menage à trois down to Mexico. Also like Lowry’s Under the Volcano, the prose style does most of the work in the novel, although critics complained that it stood at right angles to the plot and characterization. His subject, here and elsewhere, is what he said that Lowry’s subject was: “consciousness under stress.”

His admirers’ favorite was Wittgenstein’s Mistress (1988). “Get it?” Amy Hempel wrote in her review. “Wittgenstein . . . was homosexual.” The novel plays with language’s slippery referentiality and the possibility it refers to nothing at all except itself:

Such things can happen. As in the case of Guy de Maupassant, who ate his lunch every day at the Eiffel Tower. Well, the point being that this was the only place in Paris from which he did not have to look at it. For the life of me I have no idea how I know that. Any more than I have any idea how I also happen to know that Guy de Maupassant liked to row. When I said that Guy de Maupassant ate his lunch every day at the Eiffel Tower, so that he did not have to look at it, I meant that it was the Eiffel Tower he did not wish to look at, naturally, and not his lunch.Wittgenstein’s Mistress is kept in print, along with two other novels and his Collected Poems, by the irreplaceable Dalkey Archive Press, which will take it upon itself, I hope, to reprint his 1978 critical study Malcolm Lowry’s Volcano: Myth, Symbol, Meaning.

D. G. Myers

A critic and literary historian for nearly a quarter of a century at Texas A&M and Ohio State universities, I am the author of The Elephants Teach and ex-fiction critic for Commentary. I have also written for Jewish Ideas Daily, the New York Times Book Review, the Weekly Standard, Philosophy and Literature, the Sewanee Review, First Things, the Daily Beast, the Barnes & Noble Review, the Journal of the History of Ideas, American Literary History, and other journals. Here is the Commonplace Blog’s statement of principles, such as they are.